Guide To Set Up Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin

SetUp Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin: Here at BroughtMeUp I use WordPress SEO Plugin By Yoast. Certainly it is the most prominent WordPress SEO plugin that is available for free. I believe it to be the best alternative to All in One SEO Pack. WordPress SEO Plugin By Yoast is packed with the feature every bloggers need and many of you would find some of the feature included Yoast SEO WordPress plugins only in premium SEO plugins.

Though the free version of Yoast SEO WordPress plugin includes most of the recommended features but you can also buy its premium version. Make your choice and use below links to download WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast.

Why Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin?

I will be discussing some of the best features of this awesome plugins that every blogger would love to have in a true SEO WordPress plugin. In free version also it offers most of its features apart from one or two and if your are going out of budget I would suggest you to download free version of Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin. Anyways lets move on to the features of SEO WordPress plugin by Yoast.

I think that many features would be enough to know the importance of using Yoast WordPress Plugin. Assuming You have downloaded, installed the plugin and activated the plugin, lets proceed with the setup of Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin.

How To Setup WordPress SEO Plugin By Yoast

Setting Up Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is not at all easy as one minor mistake in its configuration may lead to decrease in your WordPress blog ranking and traffic and may stop search engines from indexing your blog. So here i am with the tutorial on how to setup Yoast WordPress SEO plugin without any mistakes.These are the settings that I would recommended so follow these steps carefully, I have tried to explain all part with screenshots for better understanding and better assisting you so you can set up Yoast WordPress SEO plugin by ease.

Step 1 Import And Export

If you are setting Yoast WordPress SEO plugin on a new blog or if you haven’t installed any SEO plugin earlier Please Skip this step. import and export feature in Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is quite useful as many of you may have other SEO plugins like All in one SEO, Headspace2, Old all in one SEO, Woothemes SEO framework or any other plugins by Yoast like RSS footer, Robots meta or Breadcrumbs Installed you should try to import all the settings. But before you import settings you should backup your database first. To import settings Go to SEO in left panel and then Tools > Import & Export, select the plugin from which you would like to import your settings and mark the option ”Delete the old Data after Import?(Recommended)”. and click on “Import”.

Step 2 General

Security: Under Security Option, Check “Disable The advanced part of the WordPress SEO meta box”.If you have multi other blog then I would recommended you to keep this option checked, checking it will prevent authors to redirect posts and noindex them. If you dont trust your authors then you will not regret by using this feature in Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin.

Your Info: In this tab the data you are going to fill will be shown as metadata in your site. So Choose whether you are company or person and enter your name and click on save changes.

Webmaster Tools: Use this option to verify your site to Bing, Google, Pinterest, Yandex. It is important for your Site SEO. By using this option you don’t need to add meta tags to your site or upload a file in order to verify your site. This automatically do it for you, just add meta code that you received from Bing, Google, Pinterest, Yandex in their respective fields.

Step 3 Title & Metas

This is probably the most important part of Yoast WordPress SEO plugins and most sensitive too as any minor mistake in this part of WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast can greatly affect your site performance, traffic etc. Title and Metas section has several tabs in it. I will cover each of them one by one (please do refer to screenshots for better understanding)

Update: Now Sitewide Meta Setting is now located in “Title & Metas” and under “Other” Tab

Generalin this tab you can configure site wide general settings.Title settings: WordPress SEO by yoast can auto detect whether it need to rewrite titles or not.You can leave this option as it is but usually force rewrite titles option is unchecked.Sitewide Meta Settings:Noindex subpages of achieves: Check this optionUse meta keywords tag: You can check or uncheck this option as Google made it official that they don’t care about Keywords meta tags.Add Noodp meta robots tag sitewide: Use this option if you want to prevent search engine from using DMOZ description for pages from this site in the search results.If you want to choose my settings i have checked it because if you have DMOZ listing for your site then DMOZ description usually get outdated, inaccurate or may not have written well. If you are not sure about this meta tags i suggest to leave this option unchecked.Add Noodp meta robots tag sitewide: Use this option if you want to prevent search engine from using yahoo! directory description fro pages from this site in the search results. Again If you want to choose my settings i have checked it because if you have Yahoo! listing for your site then Yahoo! directory description usually get outdated, inaccurate or may not have written well. If you are not sure about this meta tags i suggest to leave this option unchecked.Clean Up the <head>:Hide Rsd links: Check this optionHide WLW Manifest Links: Check This optionHide Shortlink For Posts: check this optionHide RSS Links: check this option

HomeClick on home tabTitle template: Give title of your homepage that you want it to appear in search engines.Meta Description Template: Homepage meta description for search enginesMeta keywords Template: meta keywords for search engine.

Post TypesUnder post tab you can define your own custom post types. By default Yoast WordPress SEO plugin automatically enters title template variables for all post types and leaves description and other field blank but i would recommended you to change the Title templates, you can remove the sitename and keep only actual title element.

TaxonomiesThis setting depends on your site SEO plan but i would recommended you to keep categories and tags as noindex and follow. I would recommended to Check “noindex, follow” and “hide”.

OtherUpdate: Other tab now includes “site meta settings” please refer above for Title & Meta settings.In this tab you can set indexing of your author and date based archives. just check “noindex,follow” box and leave everything as it is.

Step 4 Social

one of the best feature of Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is that you can integrate your site with Facebook, Twitter and Google+. In this tab you can configure Facebook open graph meta tags, default image for Facebook. You can also configure twitter meta card. adding image for Facebook is useful because when a post doesn’t have image then the default image is shared on Facebook.

Step 5 XML Sitemaps

For SEO of any WordPress site, sitemaps are very essential. With the help of sitemaps you can get your site indexed by major search engines and thus increase your website SEO and in turn increase your site traffic. WordPress SEO by Yoast makes it easy for you to add XML sitemaps in WordPress. To enable XML sitemap functionality, you just need to check the box that says “Check this box to enable XML sitemap functionality.”

General Settings: Under general settings, make sure you checkping yahoo and ping ask.com. By default after content publication WordPress SEO plugin automatically pings Google and Bing and you must check ping yahoo and ping ask.com to ping to these search engines.

Exclude post types: You can exclude any post type that you don’t want to include in the sitemaps. Check the appropriate box.

Exclude Taxonomies: You can exclude any taxonomy that you don’t want to include in the sitemaps. Check the appropriate box.

Entries Per page: Enter the maximum number of entries per sitemap page. By default its value is 1000 but if you are facing memory issues, you can reduce the number.

Step 6 Permalinks

Make sure you don’t get this confused permalinks in WordPress SEO plugin with WordPress permalinks in settings tab, these are advanced adds on to that permalinks in WordPress settings. you can clean your URLs and get rid of replytocom parameter. You can follow the screenshot below. Check the followings and leave other as they are:

Redirect attachment URL’s to parent post URL.

remove the ?replytocom variables.

Redirects ugly URL’s to clean permalinks.

Step 7 Internal Link

WordPress SEO plugin also offers breadcrumbs and is not about internal linking within posts. Click on Internal Links from the left panel. You can enable Breadcrumbs by checking it. though I haven’t tried this service of WordPress SEO plugin by yoast but you can read more about it here. When your settings are done in this step, go to Google rich snippet testing tool to check how Google will show your blog posts in Google search results.

Step 8 RSS

this feature automatically add content to RSS means it add link back to your blog or blog post. So that scrappers add these links automatically letting search engine knows the original source of the content. just add “The post %%POSTLINK%% appeared first on %%BLOGLINK%%.” in content to put after each post in the feed section.

Step 9 Edit Files

Using this option you can edit and make changes in your .htaccess file and robots.txt files.

Step 10 Redirects (Only In Premium Version)

When You are getting errors such as 404 you can direct that url to any other url of your choice.

Step 11 Webmaster Tool (Only In Premium Version)

to enable this feature of Yoast WordPress SEO plugin you need to add the authentication code. And the you can monitor your website from errors like crawl errors etc. as in Google webmaster tools from WordPress dashboard.

We have finished with the guide to setup WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. Make sure of settings as any wrong settings can greatly affect your site performance i.e traffic and SEO.Recommended Reading

Prince Sumberia

Hey Incredibles, Welcome to BroughtMeUp. I'm Prince Sumberia, an incredibly passionate blogger from India and. Here at BroughtMeUp I write about Starting & managing a blog, WordPress, SEO, Social media, and Making Money online.
You can read more about me at About Me Page.

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